Monday, June 29, 2015

Cutting Loose



 

 
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Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path -- but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.



–William Stafford




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Sunday, June 28, 2015

blessing





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May your soul be happy, journey joyfully.

You have escaped from the city full of fear and trembling;
If the body’s image has gone, await the image-maker; if the
body is utterly ruined, become all soul.


If your face has become saffron pale through death, become a
dweller among tulip beds and Judas trees.


If the doors of repose have been barred to you, come, depart
by way of the roof and the ladder.


If you have been secluded from water and bread, like bread
become the food of the souls, and so become!

 

–Rumi



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Friday, June 26, 2015

October





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It is time to lose your life,
Even if it isn't over.
It is time to say goodbye and try to die.
It is October.

The mellow cello
Allee of trees is almost lost in sweetness and mist
When you take off your watch at sunrise
To lose your life.

You catch the plane.
You land again.
You arrive in the place.
You speak the language.

You will live in a new house,
Even if it is old.
You will live with a new wife,
Even if she is too young.

Your slender new husband will love you.
He will walk the dog in the cold.
He will cook a meal on the stove.
He will bring you your medication in bed.

Dawn at the city flower market downtown.
The vendors have just opened.
The flowers are so fresh.
The restaurants are there to decorate their tables.

Your husband rollerblades past, whizzing,
Making a whirring sound, winged like an angel--
But stops and spins around and skates back
To buy some cut flowers in the early morning frost.

I am buying them for you.
I am buying them for your blond hair at dawn.
I am buying them for your beautiful breasts.
I am buying them for your beautiful heart.


–Frederick Seidel



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Monday, June 22, 2015

Mother, excerpt




 
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You have been gone a month today
and have missed three rains and one nightlong
watch for tornadoes. I sat in the cellar
from six to eight while fat spring clouds
went somersaulting, rumbling east. Then it poured,
a storm that walked on legs of lightning,
dragging its shaggy belly over the fields.

Were it not for the way you taught me to look
at the world, to see the life at play in everything,
I would have to be lonely forever.


–Ted Kooser
Delights & Shadows




Friday, June 19, 2015

location


 
 
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Returning to the Source from where one emanates,
No death can be found.

–The Lost Writings of Wu Hsin 


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Thursday, June 18, 2015

death and time






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It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life.

Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension.

Death does away with time.



—Simone de Beauvoir


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Tuesday, June 16, 2015

The Wild






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First sight of water through trees
glimpsed as a child
and the smell of the lake then
on the mountain
how long it has lasted
whole and unmoved and without words
the sound native to a great bell
never leaving it
paw in the air
guide
ancient curlew not recorded
flying at night into
the age of night
sail sailing in the dark
so the tone of it
still crosses the years
through death after death
and the burnings the departures
the absences
carrying its own
song inside it
of bright water

—W. S. Merwin
Migration



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Sunday, June 14, 2015

On The Vanity of Existence






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A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more.
The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true. The crudest intellect cannot speculate on such a subject without having a presentiment that Time is something ideal in its nature.
This ideality of Time and Space is the key to every true system of metaphysics; because it provides for quite another order of things than is to be met with in the domain of nature.


–Arthur Schopenhauer
On The Vanity of Existence




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Saturday, June 13, 2015

After Apple-Picking






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My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.


Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.


I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough 
And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.


Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.


My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.


And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound 
Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired 
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.


For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.


One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.


Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.


–Robert Frost



 
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Victor Bregeda,
The Shape of Things to Come

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Wednesday, June 10, 2015

to be opposite






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With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, surrounding plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.
We know what is really out there only from the animal's gaze; for we take the very young child and force it around, so that it sees objects - not the Open, which is so deep in animals' faces. Free from death.
We, only, can see death; the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.
 
Never, not for a single day, do we have before us that pure space into which flowers endlessly open.  Always there is World and never Nowhere without the No: that pure unseparated element which one breathes without desire and endlessly knows.  
A child may wander there for hours, through the timeless stillness, may get lost in it and be shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.
For, nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stares beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze. Lovers, if the beloved were not there blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel...
As if by some mistake, it opens for them behind each other... But neither can move past the other, and it changes back to World.
Forever turned toward objects, we see in them the mere reflection of the realm of freedom, which we have dimmed. Or when some animal mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.
That is what fate means: to be opposite, to be opposite and nothing else, forever.
 
 
–Rainer Maria Rilke





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Tuesday, June 9, 2015

before the beginning of years






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Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And Life, the shadow of death.

–Algernon Charles Swinburne




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Monday, June 8, 2015

gosh






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War of the Foxes


(i)

Two rabbits were chased by a fox, of all the crazy shit in the world, and the fox kept up the chase,
circling the world until the world caught up with them in some broken-down downtown metropolis.
Inside the warren, the rabbits think fast. Pip touches the only other rabbit listening.



Pip: We’re doomed.
Flip: Oh Pip!
Pip: I know where you can hide.
Flip: Are you sure?
Pip: Yes. Here, hide inside me.

This is the story of Pip and Flip, the bunny twins. We say that once there were two and now there is
only one. When the fox sees Pip run past, he won’t know that the one is inside the other. He’ll think Well, there’s at least one more rabbit in that warren. But no one’s left. You know this and I know this.
Together we trace out the trail away from doom. There isn’t hope, there is a trail. I follow you.


When a rabbit meets a rabbit, one takes the time to tell the other this story. The rabbits then agree
there must be two rabbits, at least two rabbits, and that in turn there is a trace. I am only repeating
what I heard. This is one love. There are many loves but only one war.



Bird 1: This is the same story.
Bird 2: No, this is the rest of the story.

Let me tell you a story about war. A man found his life to be empty. He began to study Latin.
Latin was difficult for the man to understand. I will study Latin, even though it is difficult, said the man. Yes, even if it is difficult.


Let me tell you a story about war. A man had a dream about a woman and then he met her. The man
had a dream about the woman’s former lover. The former lover was sad, he wanted to fight. The
man said to the woman I will have to comfort your former lover or I will always be fighting him in my dreams. Yes, said the woman. You will need to comfort him, or we will never be finished with this.


Let me tell you a story about war. A fisherman’s son and his dead brother sat on the shore. That is my
country and this is your country and the line in the sand is the threshold between them
, said the dead brother. Yes, said the fisherman’s son.


You cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes.


Bird 1: This is the wrong story.
Bird 2: All stories are the wrong story when you are impatient.

Let me tell you a story about war. A man says to another man Can I tell you something? The other man
says No. A man says to another man There is something I have to tell you. No, says the other man. No, you don’t.


Bird 1: Now we are getting somewhere.
Bird 2: Yes, yes we are.

(ii)


Let me tell you a story about war:

A boy spills a glass of milk and his father picks him up by the back of the shirt and throws him
against the wall. You killed my wife and you can’t even keep a glass on the table. The wife had died of sadness, by her own hand. The father walks out of the room and the room is almost empty.


The road outside the house lies flat on the ground. The ground surrenders.

The father works late. The dead wife’s hand makes fishsticks while the boy sits in the corner where
he fell. The fish in the fishsticks think to themselves This is not what we meant to be.


Its roots in the ground and its branches in the air, a tree is pulled in two directions.

The wife has a dead hand. This is earlier. She is living and her dead hand feeds her pills that don’t
work. The boy sleeps on the roof or falls out of trees. The father works late. The wife looks out the
window and thinks Not this.


The boy is a bird, bad bird. He falls out of trees.

(iii)


Let me tell you a story about war:

The fisherman’s son serves drinks to sailors. He stands behind the bar. He listens closely for news of
his dead brother. The sailors are thirsty. They drink rum. Tell me a story, says the fisherman’s son.


“There is nothing interesting about the sea. The water is flat, flat and calm, it seems a sheet of glass.
You look at it, the more you look at it the more you feel like you are looking into your own head,
which is a stranger’s head, empty. We listen to the sound with our equipment. I have learned to
understand this sound. When you look there is nothing, with the equipment there is sound. We sit in
rows and listen down the tunnels for the song. The song has red words in it. We write them down on
sheets of paper and pass them along. Sometimes there is noise and sometimes song and often there is
silence, the long tunnel, the sea like glass...



You are a translator, says the fisherman’s son. Yes, says the sailor. And the sound is the voice of the enemy.
Yes, yes it is.

(iv)


Let me tell you a story about war:

They went to the museum and wandered the rooms. He saw a painting and stood in front of it for
too long. It was a few minutes before she realized he had gotten stuck. He was stuck looking at a
painting. She stood next to him, looking at his face and then the face in the painting. What do you see?
she asked. I don’t know, he said. He didn’t know. She was disappointed, then bored. He was looking at
a face and she was looking at her watch. This is where everything changed. There was now a distance
between them. He was looking at a face but it might as well have been a cabbage or a sugar beet.
Perhaps it was something about yellow near pink. He didn’t know how to say it. Years later he still
didn’t know how to say it, and she was gone.


(v)


Let me tell you a story about love:

There was a place on the floor where they could lie together, on the floor together, backs pressed to
the carpet, where they could look out the window together and see only the tops of the trees. They
would do this. They would lie on the floor and say things like Now we are in the country! or Oh, what a far away place this is! Then they would stand up and look out the window the way they usually did, the
houses reappearing in the window frame.


She had a soft voice and strong hands. When she sang she would seem too large for the room and
she would play guitar and sing which would make his chest feel huge. Sometimes he would touch her
knee and smile. Sometimes she would touch his face and close her eyes.


(vi)


Fox rounds the warren but there are no bunnies, jumps up with claws but there are no bunnies,
moves down the road but there are no bunnies. There are no bunnies. He chases a bird instead. All
wars are the same war. The bird flies away.


(vii)
The fisherman’s son knows nothing worth stealing. Perhaps, perhaps.

He once put a cat in a cardboard box but she got out anyway. He once had a brother he lost to the
sea. Brother, dead brother, who speaks to him in dreams. These are a few things worth saying.


He knows that when you snap a mast it’s time to get a set of oars or learn how to breathe
underwater. Rely on one thing too long and when it disappears and you have nothing... well, that’s
just bad planning. It’s embarrassing, to think it could never happen.


A man does work. A machine can, too. Power of agency, agent of what. This is a question we might
ask. An agent is a spy or not. A spy is a promise to God, hidden where only God can find it.


The agents meet at the chain link fence and tell each other stories. A whisper system. To testify
against yourself is an interesting thing, a sacrifice. Some people do it. Some people find money in the
street but you cannot rely on it. The fisherman’s son is at the fence, standing there, waiting to see if
he is useful.


You cannot get in the way of anyone’s path to God. You can, but is does no good. Every agent
knows this. Some say God is where we put our sorrow. God says Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?


You cannot get in the way of anyone’s path to happiness, it also does no good. The problem is
figuring out which part is the path and which part is the happiness.


It’s a blessing, every day someone shows up at the fence. And when no one shows up, a different
kind of blessing. In the wrong light anyone can look like a darkness.


–Richard Siken





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Thursday, June 4, 2015

everywhere now





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Tuesday, June 2, 2015

not to worry






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This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. 
Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing
at what you thought was your grief.



–Rumi



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Monday, June 1, 2015

Haunted






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We are looking for your laugh.
Trying to find the path back to it
between drooping trees.
Listening for your rustle
under bamboo,
brush of fig leaves,
feeling your step
on the porch,
natty lantana blossom
poked into your buttonhole.
We see your raised face
at both sides of a day.
How was it, you lived around
the edge of everything we did,
seasons of ailing and growing,
mountains of laundry and mail?
I am looking for you first and last
in the dark places,
when I turn my face away
from headlines at dawn,
dropping the rolled news to the floor.
Your rumble of calm
poured into me.
There was the saving grace
of care, from day one, the watching
and being watched
from every corner of the yard.


–Naomi Shihab Nye
from Transfer




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